Immanuel Kant Quotes

To be good, and do good, is the whole duty of man comprised in a few words.

A sense of duty pursues us ever. It is omnipresent, like the Deity. If we take to ourselves the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, duty performed or duty violated is still with us, for our happiness or our misery. If we say the darkness shall cover us, in the darkness as in the light our obligations are yet with us.

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.

It seems that if you put people on paper and move them through time, you cannot help but talk about ethics, because the ethical realm exists nowhere if not here: in the consequences of human actions as they unfold in time, and the multiple interpretive possibility of those actions.

The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile.

Our duty is to stand up for those who do the right thing.

The ends do not justify the means. The means are the ends.

As we know, while our species remains alive, everybody has the sacred duty to be optimistic. Ethically, any other behaviour wouldn't be admissible.

If you say morality is just what you like, you lose the metaphysical level of what in the history of philosophy is called 'categorical imperative.'

Men must be either the slaves of duty, or the slaves of force.

Duty is what goes most against the grain, because in doing that we do only what we are strictly obliged to, and are seldom much praised for it.

Duty does not consist in suffering everything, but in suffering everything for duty. Sometimes, indeed, it is our duty not to suffer.

Stern daughter of the voice of God! O Duty! if that name thou love Who art a light to guide, a rod To check the erring and reprove.

Morality rests upon a sense of obligation; and obligation has no meaning except as implying a Divine command, without which it would cease to be.

Nothing is properly one's duty but what is also one's interest.

It is right that what is just should be obeyed. It is necessary that what is strongest should be obeyed.

There is no such thing as duty. If you know that a thing is right, you want to do it. If you don't want to do it - it isn't right. If it's right and you don't want to do it - you don't know what right is and you're not a man.

The idea of duty--that recognition of something to be lived for beyond the mere satisfaction of self--is to the moral life what the addition of a great central ganglion is to animal life.

Duty is whatever opposes inclination.

It's not enough not to be evil. We also actively try to be good.

All of us want to do well. But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.

We all have the duty to do good.

In the time we have it is surely our duty to do all the good we can to all the people we can in all the ways we can.

The wretched have no compassion, they can do good only from strong principles of duty.

Not to help justice in her need would be an impiety.